NewsLast Chance: Albee's Tall Women To Stride Out of Milwaukee Chamber, May 3

May 01, 1998

Last Chance to catch the Pulitzer-winning drama Three Tall Women at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, finishing its scheduled run May 3. The show, which began Apr. 18, closes the MCT season.

Last Chance to catch the Pulitzer-winning drama Three Tall Women at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, finishing its scheduled run May 3. The show, which began Apr. 18, closes the MCT season.

Edward Albee won his third Pulitzer Prize (after A Delicate Balance and Seascape) for Three Tall Women, a look back at three stages in the life of an elderly lady. The author's introduction to the published version of Women answered charges that he used the play -- about a stern, unhappy matriarch -- as an attack on his own mother: "I knew my subject -- my adoptive mother, whom I knew from my infancy ...until her death over 60 years later, and who, perhaps, knew me as well. Perhaps. I knew I did not want to write a revenge piece -- could not honestly do so, for I felt no need for revenge. We had managed to make each other very unhappy over the years, but I was past all that, though I think she was not. I harbor no ill-will towards her; it is true I did not like her much, could not abide her prejudices, her loathings, her paranoias, but I did admire her pride, her sense of self. As she moved toward 90, began rapidly failing both physically and mentally, I was touched by the survivor, the figure clinging to the wreckage, only partly of her own making, refusing to go under."

Albee's other plays include The Death Of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, The Man Who Had Three Arms, Tiny Alice and The Lady From Dubuque.